Those Turkish military pilots apparently find the handling of a fighter jet a bit too droll and hum drum, so they seem to prefer landing their airships upon runways that double as wildlife preserves for big cats. What a thrill it must be.

Is there anywhere in the South where one can find a French restaurant without an American flag front and center? This restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia has Old Glory hanging from the Eiffel Tower. How great is that? Viva la differance!

I have been using Flickr for about nine months and it is a great way to share photographs. However, I have been dismayed by Flickr’s acceptance and actual encouragement of pornography, as I, as a grandmother, want to share grandmotherly photographs with my friends, family and young grandchildren. Flickr has privacy levels that work quite well as a manner of keeping my photos unseen to the public, if I choose, and I do for most of my personal photographs of family events. However, when my viewers and young children come to visit my photographs they very well may be exposed to tasteless and downright pornographic content from others without my being able to control it, as Flickr allows pornographic content.

Following are Flickr policies, which I can assure you are not followed by members, as I have been exposed to disgusting and explicit “genitalia” and pornographic “intimate moments” a number of times in the public groups and pools. As anyone with a brain knows by now, those who upload pornography to the Internet are not content to have it remain behind privacy screens, available only to those who share a fetish for such things. No, pornography spammers are always “hell-bent” on having everyone and anyone gaze upon the creations of their warped minds.

If you do we’ll make your photostream private and remind you of this Guideline. If you don’t heed our warning and continue to make similar content public, we’ll terminate your account without warning. This applies to your Buddy Icon as well.

Swearing. People ask if it’s OK to swear. It is OK to swear so long as you’re not offending, insulting or harassing anybody.

Porn. Porn, nudity and other such content is not disallowed on Flickr, but it shouldn’t be posted in public areas. (Here’s a link to the more general Community Guidelines.

Although Flickr even bans “frontal nudity” I am not including it in my complaints, as firstly, “frontal nudity” is found everywhere on Flickr and no one seems to mind in the least. Secondly, I am not quite sure what is “frontal nudity” as Flickr describes it as displaying parts of the body which are usually covered by a bathing suit, but they do not explain what is a bathing suit. I am left to assume that they mean the popular one-piece bikini. Although I wish there were a way to avoid seeing “frontal nudity”, at least most of those are not pornographic. Anyway, the most popular photographs on Flickr, the ones with more than 9,999 public views illustrate well the photographs that Flickr users like to look at, and it is mostly photographs of “partial nudity”. Cats seem to come in second.

Now, with Google’s Picasa Web Albums, the new kid on the block, there may be hope for the more mundane and boring photographers of the world, like me. We are the amateurs; the ones who like to photograph grandchildren playing soccer, or landscapes or garden flowers. Perhaps we will find a welcome haven at Picasa Web Albums if it is able to live up to its stated public policy, which, bans pornography outright, unlike Flickr.

As set forth in the Terms of Service, … Picasa Web Albums may refuse to host content that violates its policies including:

illegal content

invasions of personal privacy

violations of copyright. Please see our DMCA policy for more information.

spam and malicious code or viruses

pornography or obscenity

promotions of hate or incitement of violence

I like Google’s straightforward stance on “pornography or obscenity” violating its policies, in contrast to Flickr’s weasel words: “Porn, nudity and other such content is not disallowed on Flickr, but it shouldn’t be posted in public… .”

We Shall Overcome Pete Seeger, (YEA!) with … Bruce Springsteen. Perhaps it will be an improvement; only time will tell.

I first heard the album from my neighbor and went and bought three of the combination CD/DVDs. I gave two as gifts and kept one for myself. Although both CD and DVD sides played well on my media player, the tracks from the CD would not store in my Bose tuner, as they are supposed to do. I phoned Bose, and they said that was a problem with the CD side and told me to copy it onto my computer and then make a CD and use that to store in my tuner.

That is when I discovered that the CD would not play on my computer’s CD player, although the DVD would. I looked all over the album cover and there it was! Why had I not seen it when I purchased the recording? The “teeny, tiny” small print disclaimer is on the inside of the CD/DVD jacket, which can be read by the purchaser only after opening the well sealed packageing. It is the “liberal” way that those pseudo-capitalist liberal artists have of treating their paying customers, I suppose. The fine and teeny print reads “The audio side of this disc does not conform to CD specifications and therefore will not play in some CD and DVD players.” Thank you, Bruce Springsteen Productions.

Should I return it to Best Buy? The “some CD and DVD players” on which it does not play is my Gateway computer. Gateway must be one of those capitalist pig companies, I suppose. Anyway, I had come across the entire Springsteen “We Shall Overcome” CD at MuchMusic.Net, available for free download. I had wondered about that. Now I guess I understand – at least I can listen to the album on my computer now.

I probably will not return the CD/DVD because I do enjoy watching the performance. It is great. It does puzzle me that the best country music produced in fifteen years is coming from … ugh … Bruce Springsteen. But I’m not gonna worry myself about that now as I am just enjoying these songs of true Americana. Only one thing – I’m not giving Pete Seeger any credit for anything! They are not his songs; they belong to America! Not only is this one of the best country albums in years … not since the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was recording, but they say it is also a great … ugh … folk album and one of the best rock albums. Rock? Who knows? Certainly I don’t.

Even if you cannot play this album on your CD player, buy it for the DVD, as I ended up doing, and download the MP3s from the Internet. Give a liberal credit when he does something good and right for America. Buy it from Amazon, above, as it’s cheaper than Best Buy. As of today, the mp3 download is still up at MusicMatch.

“Indian-American corporate honcho Indra Nooyi” is how “Indians Abroad” describes the next CEO of US multinational PepsiCo. We non-hyphenated Americans just know her as one of the most powerful “middle-fingered“ women in America.

It’s time; time to switch back to Coca-Cola, or else, with each swallow, be haunted by Indra Nooyi’s description of you, Mr. and Ms. American imbiber of her cola drink, as “the long middle finger.”

What is most crucial to my analogy of the five fingers as the five major continents, is that each of us in the U.S.–the long middle finger–must be careful that when we extend our arm in either a business or political sense, we take pains to assure we are giving a hand . . . not the finger. Sometimes this is very difficult. Because the U.S.–the middle finger–sticks out so much, we can send the wrong message unintentionally.

Unfortunately, I think this is how the rest of the world looks at the U.S. right now. Not as part of the hand–giving strength and purpose to the rest of the fingers–but, instead, scratching our nose and sending a far different signal.

It has been more than a year since Ms. Nooyi, in a carefully constructed speech, came up with the middle finger analogy to describe Americans. Soon afterwards, she and her husband were honored guests of the Bushes: Guess Who Came to Supper – At the White House? At that time an American military officer serving in Baghad was so offended that he wrote the following to PepsiCo:

I found Ms. Nooyi’s graduation comments offensive, not to mention off-base, because the central theme of her speech was that America is, in essence, “flipping off the world.”

In the meantime, I will stop consuming PepsiCo products and encourage others to do the same. Please remember, it is this country, and the brave men and women who defend it, that provided the free enterprise system that allowed your company to become a global corporate power. I would hope that Pepsi senior executives would show more respect for this great country. Perhaps the troops who enjoy your products would hope so as well. (The Weekly Standard)

The ‘Islam is the religion of peace’ mantra has burned itself out, finally! We can be grateful for small favors. For a religion to have the gall to speak of ‘peace‘ when its common response to any criticism of it is violence, finally has dawned upon even the most “devout” of Islam. Danish cartoons, a Dutch screenplay, Salman Rushdie’s novel, Israel defending its national borders against neighboring Arab states and Palestinian terrorists, is justification enough for any devoted Muslim father to arm his teen-aged son as a soon-to-be-dead bomber.

Devout Muslims and the bien pensant multiculturalists have been pushing that same ‘religion of peace’ mantra down our throats, expecting we would swallow it, hook, line and sinker, each time there was just one more incident of Islamic terrorism. They are finally realizing that we just aren’t that dumb!

Only the most devout of all Muslims truly believes that Islam is a ‘religion of peace’ and exhibits the accepted model of ‘peaceful’ Muslim behavior. Where do we find such devout Muslims? They are the homicide bombers and members of the world-wide Muslim terrorist network who at this very moment are plotting murder in their supposedly sacred mosques. That is where one finds the most devout of all Muslims.

Less devout Muslims, those who have not yet developed a strong enough faith to murder their friends and neighbors for being non-believers or Jews, should come to their senses and escape and eschew such a religion. Other creeds, faiths and even atheism do not require one to teach hatred of others to children or to send one’s own young sons and daughters into the world as suicidal murderers.

Give me that old time religion
Tis the old time religion,
Tis the old time religion,
And it’s good enough for me.

2005 to date, by Kerfuffles.
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